Sacred and Secular

The Story of the Eighteenth Century cannot be plotted as a simple, smooth development toward a secular understanding of the world and man’s place in it, let alone as the “rise of modern paganism” (Peter Gay) —a phrase that applies with even less force to Germany than it does to France or England. If secular beliefs were growing in boldness and authority, and secular attitudes gaining ground in the life of society, it is no less true that Christianity continued to exert a strong hold on people’s hearts and habits. It seems an apt expression of the tendencies of the age, therefore, that of the two great epic poems written in Germany in the eighteenth century, one was a religious epic, and the other a secular romance.

Sacred Epic: Klopstock, Der Messias

The twenty cantos and almost 20,000 lines of Der Messias were written by Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803) over a twenty-five year period between 1748 and 1773. It was thus itself an epic undertaking that from the beginning captured the imagination of the German reading public. For devout Christians, it was the answer to their prayers: in an age of dangerous freethinking, here was the long-awaited poet who would sing the “Helden- Geschichte von JEsu von Nazareth” (heroic story of Jesus of Nazareth). For more aesthetically minded critics, Klopstock was the poet who at last provided Germany with the great epic every national literature needed to be worthy of standing alongside the ancient Greek and Roman traditions. What is more, he had written it in the long hexameter verse favored in classical literature, and was thus the first modern to have risen to the challenge set by Homer and Virgil. When at last his labors were complete, Klopstock could therefore boast that in Der Messias the elevation of language and religion had erected an eternal monument to his name (an obvious echo of Horace, Odes, 3.30).

Posterity, however, has not been as kind to Klopstock’s epic as he clearly expected. The power of his poetic language is recognized.